The Wars

  It began like that. As nothing more than an angry man who was slightly crazy.

  Robert paused and watched for a moment—vaguely amused by the sight of the flailing arms and legs and the sound of the invective pouring from the man’s lips. Then he walked on with his towel around his head.

  By the time he’d reached the corridor the noise had swollen to such a degree that he turned around for another look. Five or six more patients had joined in the fray and most of the soldiers were standing up in their tubs and yelling at the combatants and waving their towels as if they were at a boxing match. Robert thought it would be a good thing if some more attendants were to come down and control the situation but his mind had already turned to thoughts of his chicken dinner when he entered the corridor and turned towards his cell. It was not till he was two or three steps inside that he noticed the lantern had been extinguished—and then it was too late. Someone was in there with him and the door was swinging closed behind him, shutting the sound of his cry in with him and cutting it off from the men outside.

  His cry was nothing more than a startled response to the sound of the door clanging shut. No one had touched him, though he knew he was not alone. He stood absolutely still in what he thought must be the centre of the cell. All he could hear was breathing and a very slight rustling sound. He thought of the rats—but there was nowhere he could climb. He tried to adjust his eyes to the dark but the dark was complete and not even mitigated by a crack beneath the door. Robert was blind. He could not see at all.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he said.

  Someone was moving.

  So was someone else.

  There were two.

  Almost at once, Robert heard a third sound that told him he was surrounded. Three at the very least and more than likely four were hidden in the dark. Robert felt a tug—very light at first—at the end of his towel. He pulled back and the pressure at the other end increased. He was afraid to put his hands out. He was certain he would touch someone and the thought of this was unbearable—not knowing who was there or why they had closed the door and locked him in.

  The towel was suddenly yanked from his hand and he stood there naked and defenceless. He put his hand down to cover his scrotum, which suddenly felt as if it were going to be hit. His eyes felt the same and he wanted to cover them for fear he would be blinded but he didn’t dare. He needed his other hand to defend himself. He feared an attack with weapons. His throat was constricted and his mouth had gone completely dry. He could barely breathe. The dark was terrible and seemed to invade his brain. The cell had become instantly humid, like a hothouse or a steam room. Robert’s body poured with sweat. His mind went stumbling over a beach of words and picked them up like stones and threw them around inside his head but none of them fell in his mouth. Why? he kept thinking. Why?

  Someone brushed against his side. Robert cringed. A hand reached underneath his arm from behind and caressed him just above the groin. Fingers dipped down through his pubic hair and seized his penis. Robert felt the length of a naked body press against his back and a mouth press down against his shoulder. The fingers holding him started stroking him very slowly. Robert pressed back as if to escape the fingers but someone kneeling in front of him grasped him around the knees and began to rub their cheek against his thighs. Robert threw his head back and tried to scream but a hand went over his face and fingers were inserted in his mouth. They pulled at his lips until he thought his jaw was going to snap and the scream made a knot in his throat and began to choke him.

  He struggled with such impressive violence that all his assailants fell upon him at once—still without a sound—and holding his legs and arms out wide, they jerked him off his feet.

  He was spun around in the dark so many times he lost all sense of gravity. Then he was lowered onto his back and held there by someone who was lying underneath him. His legs were forced apart so far he thought they were going to be broken. Mouths began to suck at his privates. Hands and fingers probed and poked at every part of his body. Someone struck him in the face.

  Robert began to pass out. He could feel himself being lifted into the air again and turned around and made to lie on his face with one man still underneath him and now with another on top. All he could feel was the shape of the man who entered him and the terrible strength of the force with which it was done. Robert desperately tried to sink his teeth in the man underneath—but someone grabbed him by the hair and pulled him back so quickly that Robert lost his breath and fainted. A pale, mean light enveloped him. His brain went silent.

  After a while—(it might have been an hour or a minute)—he could feel the others retreating. He felt their bodies going away and his own being rolled and dumped face down on the stones. He heard them pulling the bolts on the iron door and he tried to lift his head to see who they were but his neck wouldn’t function. He felt himself passing out again—but just before he did he distinctly heard one voice—and the words as clear as a bell: ‘Don’t touch his money, that’s a dead give-away.’

  His assailants, who he’d thought were crazies, had been his fellow soldiers. Maybe even his brother officers. He’d never know. He never saw their faces.

  5 Robert stood in the centre of the room.

  He wanted a clean shirt.

  He wanted a clean pair of underwear.

  He wanted his pistol.

  He looked behind the door.

  He looked underneath the bed.

  He pulled out the drawers of the dresser one by one.

  He dumped them on the floor.

  He lifted the mattress and pulled it sideways across the bed.

  Nothing but an old magazine.

  He looked behind the washstand.

  Dust.

  He tipped the water jug.

  Water.

  He threw the jug in the corner.

  It broke into sixteen pieces.

  He tipped the dresser.

  Nothing.

  He knelt beside the bed and ripped at the mattress, pulling out great loops of horsehair and dropping them onto the floor.

  He tore the ticking off the pillows and the air filled up with feathers.

  Gun. Gun. He wanted his gun.

  —

  SOMEBODY KNOCKED at the door.

  Robert could barely speak.

  The knock came again.

  ‘Who is it?’

  He was afraid to open the door.

  ‘It’s me, sir,’ said a voice he recognized but couldn’t place.

  ‘Go away,’ said Robert.

  ‘No, sir. I can’t,’ said the voice. ‘I have something for you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your kit bag.’

  Robert wrapped a sheet around him—just like a madman—and opened the door.

  It was Poole.

  ‘Good God,’ said Robert. ‘Where did you come from?’

  ‘I’m only passing through,’ said Poole. ‘But this came to Battalion H.Q. and I knew you’d want it.’ He showed the kit bag.

  ‘Come in,’ said Robert.

  ‘I can’t stay,’ said Poole. He was looking at the shambles of the room. ‘I have a boat train to catch.’

  Robert said: ‘Stay for a moment. Please.’

  Poole came in and Robert closed the door. He took the kit bag—perhaps too eagerly—almost grabbing it from Poole’s hands.

  There was a long, awkward silence.

  Robert said: ‘You’re looking well.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Poole.

  Robert smiled. ‘Your voice has changed.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I guess so.’

  ‘Well—it happens to the best of us.’ Robert tried to laugh. Then he didn’t know how to go on—or what else to say. ‘So you’re going to Blighty,’ he tried.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘How are the others? Bonnycastle? Devlin? Roots?’

  ‘I’m afraid Lieutenant Bonnycastle…’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘The others is fine. When I left them….’
/>
  ‘Yes. I understand. And you have your leave now. Well. I wish you good fortune, Poole.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘I’m glad you brought the kit bag. I wanted it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  They stood there. Robert wished with all his heart that men could embrace. But he knew now they couldn’t. Mustn’t. He said goodbye quite suddenly. Poole simply walked away. Robert heard him going down the stairs. Then he heard him in the courtyard and went to the window to watch. He wished that Poole would wave—but he didn’t. He went away and disappeared in the crowd.

  Robert sat on the mutilated mattress and opened his kit bag. Everything was there—including the picture of Rowena.

  Robert burned it in the middle of the floor.

  This was not an act of anger—but an act of charity.

  6 It was to be the most determined push the British had made on the salient. Masses of material and men were being moved up the roads. Robert joined them in the early morning.

  He was riding with an ammunition convoy with thirty-five mules and a hundred horses in the rear. His sleeping-valise, his pack trunk and his kit bag and haversack rested where he could see them in the back of a wagon. The Webley rode in its holster pressing up against his ribs.

  They began to pass the marshes where Robert had nearly drowned in the winter. It was not the same place, he thought. Blackbirds sang from the tufts of last year’s rushes. Barges moved along the canal, three of them being pulled by old men and children—only one having the luxury of a horse. It was all so incongruous. A woman waved from one of the decks. Less than a mile away—shells were falling.

  At a fork in the road there were Military Police. They wore red armbands. Their holsters were open. They were directing traffic and also keeping their eyes out for possible deserters. And, of course, for spies. Often, when there were large-scale movements of troops like this, renegades would make an attempt to get to the rear posing as wounded or sometimes as messengers. Spies, too, could infiltrate the ranks—usually posing as local peasants or refugees from near the front. The job of the M.P.s was often quite brutal. In the trenches before an attack it was their responsibility to see that everyone went over the top. Their orders were to kill any man who refused. It was done, from time to time, but Robert had never seen it.

  The road went off in two directions here. One fork led to the north-east and Ypres—the other angled to the south by a very few degrees and led to Wytsbrouk. It was this road that Robert’s convoy took. Most of the large guns and nearly all the troops went on to Wipers from where they could be deployed in the regions of the Menin Road and Hill 60. These were still objectives.

  Nothing had been won.

  Within ten minutes they had reached yet another crossroads—this time with a fork leading off towards St Eloi. Robert felt as if he had come home.

  It was 11.45 a.m.

  The sky was dotted with small, bushy clouds.

  It was odd.

  Robert looked up.

  There should have been birds.

  He was riding near the centre of the column.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a rabbit beside the road. Then he heard a rush of wings.

  Something exploded.

  The rabbit disappeared.

  Robert ducked as a whoosh of air threw him forward. His hat fell off. He opened his eyes to see the wheels of an aeroplane clipping the driver of the baggage wagon. They severed the driver’s head from his body and his arms went up as if to catch it.

  A bomb fell. It exploded to Robert’s right.

  He fell to the left, but somehow he fell on his feet and still had the reins of his horse in his hand. His horse began to rear. Robert grabbed at the halter and pulled it down. Another bomb fell. The air was alive with planes—so many planes that Robert had no time to count them.

  Horses, men and mules were running in every direction. Robert seemed to be standing at the centre. All around him everything was in motion as the men and the animals floundered into the ditches. There was so much screaming and so much roaring of fires that Robert couldn’t hear the planes when they returned or the next string of bombs when they fell.

  They came back along the road, flying so low that Robert thought they must be trying to land. He could even see the faces of the pilots. This time, the bombs fell into the thick of the column, exploding outward towards him. Then there was silence.

  The planes were gone. The road and the ditches looked like the entrance to a charnel-house. Robert put his foot in the stirrup. His horse began to walk in circles. Robert could barely get up. All he could see from the height he had gained was the distance the carnage had been spread. Other men were rising from the ground. A very few horses and mules were running back and forth in a maddened condition—trying to find some way to escape from the scene but just as unable to do so as if a fence had been put around the road.

  At the last, a circle of survivors gathered at the centre. There were seven mules, fifteen horses and twenty-three out of sixty men. When Robert bent down to collect what remained of his kit bag—which was practically nothing—Juliet’s candle was wedged in the earth in an upright position. Somehow—it had been set alight. Robert blew it out and put it in his pocket. Then he turned around and began to help the other survivors extricate themselves from the dead.

  7 Robert spent the next six days riding with the supply wagons.

  Sometimes there would be a consignment of animals as well, but it was not inevitable.

  Some of the journeys were made at night. Sometimes it rained. Always, they were shelled or bombed. In places the ditches were literally piled with corpses and carcasses to a height above the level of the road. There was also a growing static convoy of vehicles and wagons and guns that had been destroyed. The Pioneers worked the roads from dawn to dusk but the most they could do was keep them open. They could not do more than remove the bodies and the wrecks to the ditches. Nothing could be buried—nothing could be salvaged. There was neither manpower nor time between the attacks for this.

  Robert had not yet been to the trenches. All his working hours were spent with the convoys. But he heard many stories of what was happening there. In a few places, the German line had been broken and captured. The trenches south of St Eloi had been taken and the crater where Robert had shot the German sniper was no longer a part of No Man’s Land. It was now a hundred and fifty yards behind the British line.

  But the advance and its success was ragged. The Germans had counter-attacked in places and many prisoners had been taken. It was also said that a number of British troops, including many Canadians, had surrendered. No matter what the numbers thrown against the enemy, German numbers and tenacity seemed to be greater. Nonetheless—there was a steady stream of reinforcements constantly coming forward from the rear and Robert found himself always a part of a general counter-movement—like a gigantic conveyor belt that ran between the front and Bailleul—back and forward and forward and back. There was always a convoy or a staggered line of troops or a train of wagons and ambulances moving against him. Back and forward—forward and back. It was just a muddy circus and sometimes Robert hardly knew which way he went. The only orientation at night was the guns, whose emplacements were more or less constant.

  To the south of Wytsbrouk, the line was particularly weak. This was in the region where the ridge, which the Germans still held, took its turn to the north towards Passchendaele. There was an elbow in the ridge just there and this elbow gave the Germans a double advantage. They could fire on anyone advancing from two directions; which is to say where the elbow jutted forward over No Man’s Land, they could fire at the backs of troops advancing against the opposite corner of the ridge. The casualties were terrible, rising in numbers by the hundreds by the day. It seemed to be an impossible objective and it was here that many of the troops surrendered to the Germans rather than press on with the hopeless attack. A road came up from this region, cutting into the road to Bailleul to the rear of Wytsbrouk and
this road was filled with exhausted troops and with a steady flow of walking wounded. As almost had to be the case where so many men had been completely demoralized, there were, among these wounded, some deserters. The Military Police were stationed where the two roads met and, from time to time, a single revolver shot would ring out—mostly in the dark.

  One night, just about an hour before dawn, Robert was riding on this stretch of road in the fore of an ammunition train. It was raining. The mud was just beginning to be tiresome. His horse had sunk down twice into pot-holes and for a while, Robert had been forced to walk. But now he was back in the saddle—almost asleep—and the guns had fallen quiet. The rain beat down in squalls and there was hardly any light. The only sound was the falling rain and the grinding of the wagon wheels. All at once, Robert’s horse shied and refused to proceed. Robert was jarred into wakefulness.

  He tried to coax the horse forward but it was useless. Robert got down to see what the problem might be. He shone his torch at the mud, in which he was wading up to his shins, and he saw there was a body lying in the road. It was a man without a trench coat. An officer. He had been shot in the back and was sprawled face down. Robert rolled him over carefully thinking he might still be alive. But he wasn’t. He was quite dead and had been for more than an hour. It was Clifford Purchas.

  8 On the seventh day since his return to the front, Robert was caught with a fresh supply of horses and mules (some thirty of each) in the stables at Battalion Signals when a barrage was commenced that was to last for fourteen hours. This time, the German guns had found their mark. There was hardly a shell that burst to the rear or in front of the line.

  Robert had only taken eight hours’ sleep in the last three days. He was living on chocolate bars and tea and generous portions of rum which he took from the supply wagons. His body was completely numb and his mind had shrunk to a small, protective shell in which he hoarded the barest essentials of reason.